Evolution in Action – Daniel Simpson

[outro music] So welcome to this preview of my new book.

Um, it's not an easy thing to summarize in a few minutes, um, partly because it's three hundred pages long.

Um, also because it covers the entirety of yoga history to a certain extent, although it does focus in particular on modern yoga.

Um, the developments of the last two hundred years or so, um, are really the main area of interest that, uh, I wanted to go a bit deeper into than I had the opportunity to do in my last book, The Truth of Yoga.

And I basically came to write it after finishing that book and talking a lot about it and realizing that, uh, while it was indeed very helpful to put together some short summaries of, uh, key themes from the main yoga texts and also, uh, the findings of yoga scholars about how things have changed over the centuries, that a lot of people wanted to hear more about modern practice.

Where do things actually come from? How have they been influenced perhaps by things from outside of what we might think of as yoga traditions? Can we trust what we are told within modern yoga lineages about their history, uh, where things have been combined in ways that perhaps teachers did not openly admit to? And what can we learn about that process of combination that gave us modern systems of practice? Um, which although very different in many ways to things we find in earlier sources, um, do preserve a connection to some of the, you know, core principles of yoga philosophy.

And those are not necessarily present in modern globalized yoga in the twenty-first century marketplace, and I find that fascinating.

Um, so I suppose part of my inspiration in trying to, uh, zero in on all of this is to think about what it can teach us, not just about, um, the past and how the past might, uh, be of some benefit to us in the present while we think about making sense of what we do, but also how it might inspire us to do something similar in our own engagement with this thing that we call yoga.

And how does it relate to earlier incarnations of things with that name? And what might need to be perhaps added back into the mix in order to preserve some of the spirit of earlier principles that may to some extent have fallen by the wayside because of the change in priorities? And so I don't structure the book as a didactic exercise in saying, thou shalt think about all that.

Instead, it tries to tell a story.

It's an overview of how things have changed, looking at the themes that are of most relevance to my mind, at least, in trying to make sense of it all.

But there are some questions for reflection at the end of each chapter, which provide a bit of a springboard to that inquiry process.

And I hope that the book as a whole sows seeds of questions about what it means to be a practitioner.

And therefore, although it is a more scholarly book than my previous one, partly in the terms of its production, it has footnotes, for example, it has a detailed list of further reading on the topics that are addressed in each of the chapters.

It is also quite consciously situating itself within the world of yoga scholarship, as in drawing on the stuff that other people have found out, acknowledging my debt to them in rearranging that information into my own new synthesis.

And at the same time, not trying to suggest that I've done something pioneering and new here.

What I've really done, hopefully, is a service to make a lot of that detail and depth of understanding that yoga academics have a little bit more accessible, a little bit more tailored to the practitioner community than it inevitably is when it's produced by scholars for scholars.

Although scholars are, in their own way, very capable of speaking to practitioners, that's not what they do for a living most of the time.

And I think there is therefore a place in the library of yoga stuff for a book of this sort that tries to draw on all the strands of research from the ancient origins of yoga through to the development of modern practice systems, taking the key insights from the researchers who are the experts and combining those themselves into a synthesis.

So in a way, it's a meta version of the project of producing a modern postural yoga lineage in that sense.

It's mixing and matching from here and there, but I'm trying to show the working behind what I'm doing, making it clear whose research I'm drawing on, but also trying to show where you can go to find out more if you need a little bit more context on something that I'm saying.

And so in that sense, I think the academic apparatus of referencing and footnotes can be very helpful.

But if you're not interested in that, you can just skip over it and hopefully have an entertaining read.

That was my intention when writing this book.

As I say, it grew out of my earlier explanations of how yoga history is of benefit to a practitioner when considering what it means to be, let's say, authentic, a word that in itself could do with some unpacking in the 21st century.